


A Mother Always Knows

by justanothersong



Series: Chili Pepper 'Verse [7]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, F/M, Fluff, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Past Infidelity, Redemption, Religious Conflict, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Weddings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-16
Updated: 2020-12-16
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:14:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,748
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28116003
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justanothersong/pseuds/justanothersong
Summary: or, "Seventh Story, Time for a Wedding!"On the wintry eve before a wedding, a surprise visitor turns up in the back of the church.
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester, Hael/?, John Winchester/Mary Winchester, Minor or Background Relationship(s)
Series: Chili Pepper 'Verse [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/51738
Comments: 16
Kudos: 127





	A Mother Always Knows

**Author's Note:**

> This series started long before Mary Winchester was a character who had much depth on the series, so the characterization here may not match up to that on the series. I chose to continue with my own incarnation rather than try and retrofit.

It was difficult to see in the back of the church sanctuary where it was dark and the light fading from the sky failed to creep in through the stained glass windows, and Mary Winchester might not have seen the woman at all if she hadn’t reached to touch her face, allowing the low lighting to glint off of her gold watch band. Mary certainly wouldn’t have seen her at all, if it hadn’t snowed the night before. The reverend had promised that the parking lot would be fully plowed by midmorning tomorrow, in time for the wedding, but that night saw them all taking street parking and feeding the meters for the rehearsal. Mary had volunteered to go top up all of the meters as the rehearsal ran long, the kids laughing and fooling around together so joyfully that she couldn’t bear to stop them, and John’s knees aching too badly from the cold for him to play up chivalry and venture out into the cold.

Mary didn’t mind it. Sure, she had her aches and pains -- years on the police force would do that, coupled with the onset of her official time as a senior citizen -- but the cold still made her feel alive somehow, the sharp bite of the wind on her cheeks and the frosty chill drawn into her lungs with each breath putting a little extra pep in her step. She didn’t mind it much at all, and besides, if she hadn’t, she certainly wouldn’t have seen the woman sitting there.

She sidled up to her slowly, the others not paying her any mind. The boys were all laughing. Judging by the self-satisfied grin on Dean’s face, it was something that he had said that had set them off. The fondness in Dean’s eyes as he looked at Castiel, who was doubled over in laughter and bracing one hand on the edge of a pew to keep on his feet, was well worth any interruptions to the rehearsal, at least in Mary’s opinion. Besides; it gave her a little time to meet the stranger.

“Hello,” she said quietly, slipping into the last pew beside her. The woman startled, clearly not expecting to have been seen.

“Oh!” she said, then quickly snapped her attention towards the front of the church to see if the others had heard her. When it was clear she had remained unnoticed, she turned her attention back to Mary and shook her head. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to intrude, I’ll just go…”

“No please, stay,” Mary told her, shaking her head. She pointedly didn’t move from her place, blocking the other woman into the pew; her only other option would be to exit the other side, taking her nearer to the center aisle and on full display, something she clearly didn’t want. “I’m Mary Winchester. It’s nice to meet you.”

“I didn’t mean to intrude,” the woman repeated.

Mary smiled. “There’s no intrusion at a wedding,” she told her. “It’s a time of happiness, after all. Even if it’s just the rehearsal.”

“Happiness,” the woman repeated lamely, and Mary watched as her hand drifted to twist a worn golden wedding band on her own hand.

Mary took a moment to study her. The fidgeting movement of playing with her wedding band seemed out of place on someone so carefully put together. The neatly folded overcoat at her side, the grey wool suit jacket, the starched white collar of her dress shirt, and the tight auburn knot in her hair all screamed of someone who was extremely careful about how she was perceived, who would never allow so much as a strand of hair out of place. But that was just a facade; this woman, the one Mary was seeing now, was beginning to lose that control. There was color riding high in her cheeks and unshed tears in her eyes, most likely what she had been wiping away when Mary caught sight of her out of the corner of her eye. Her nails were bitten, and it looked as though she hadn’t slept.

“Of course, it’s not always what we expect, is it?” Mary pressed slowly.

The woman frowned. “What isn’t?” she asked, and Mary gave a soft smile.

“Marriage. Family. Life, I suppose,” she relented, and gave a gentle laugh. “Just look at me. I had all these plans for my life and none of them worked out quite like I expected.”

“What kind of plans?” the woman asked. She was still eyeing the door, clutching her coat in her hands. She would leave, Mary thought, if given half the chance.

“Never expected to retire, for one thing,” Mary continued. “I had too much to do. I was going to be my town’s first female chief of police, much as my family laughed at the idea.”

The woman frowned again. “Why would they laugh? That sounds like a worthy enough cause.”

Mary laughed again. “Oh, for them, it would be. My father. My brothers. Chief of police would be their crowning achievement, if they made it. But me? I was the _girl_. They expected to have me married off and having kids by the time I made it out of high school.”

The woman raised her eyebrows. “A woman has every right to work outside of the home,” she said matter-of-factly, and Mary thought perhaps this was an inkling of her typical personality: commanding and resolute in what she believed.

“Agreed,” Mary told her, nodding. “I didn’t give a damn… pardon that… what they said. I enrolled in the academy, graduated, and I was a damn… again, sorry… good cop. I never made it to chief, but I still think I could have.”

“And why didn’t you?” the woman asked.

Mary gave a dreamy sigh. “I fell in love,” she admitted, shrugging. “Found a beaten up soldier just home from the war to give my heart to. Realized that I still wanted the house and the kids and the dog and the picket fence. I didn’t have to give that all up just because it was what my family thought I _should_ want. I could still do it on my own terms.”

“I see,” the woman said, realization dawning on her features. “Those men up there, they’re your sons.”

Mary nodded with a pleased smile. “Some, yes. That’s my Sam, the tall one there, and then there’s Dean in the red flannel. That next to him is Castiel… but of course, you knew that already.”

The woman glanced down at her hands, folded in her lap over her coat. “Yes,” she agreed. She sniffled just a little and raised her head again, clearly willing away tears. “I suppose he’s not what you expected for your son, either.”

“He’s not, I’ll admit,” Mary relented, then smiled. “But he is the very best thing for Dean… and I believe Dean is the same for him. I’ve got no reason to complain and even if I did, I wouldn’t. We can’t help who we love.”

“Can’t we?” the woman responded, and Mary sighed.

“I used to wish that we could,” she told her. “You see that man up there in the first row, the one with the dark hair going all grey? That’s the soldier I fell in love with. There are times that, if I could have, I would have willed it all away. Everything I felt for him.”

“He wasn’t the man you thought he was,” the woman offered.

“He was sick,” Mary agreed. “Not in the body, but in the heart. He was a soldier, after all. They see the very worst of people and get sent home with a pat on the shoulder, thinking they could just pretend none of it ever happened and go back to their old lives. Some manage it, I suppose, but others don’t. My John managed, for a little while, but he had a little help from the bottle.”

The woman gave Mary a sympathetic glance, one of the few moments of real honest emotion she had displayed without trying to hide it. “I’m sorry,” she said honestly. “That had to be very unfair to you, especially with your children. Maybe that’s why your boy is…”

“Dean is who he is because that’s the way God made him,” Mary cut her off swiftly. “My boys aren’t perfect, but they are who they are, and they are loved.”

The woman reached into the pocket of her suit coat and retrieved a handkerchief, twisting it in her hands as she spoke. “Why are you telling me all of this?” she asked. “It doesn’t have anything to do with me.”

“I think it has more to do with you than you’d like to admit,” Mary responded, relaxing against the wooden back of the pew, settling in even though it was clear the woman was ready to bolt. “I thought I was marrying a hero, and I was, but I was also marrying a drunk. From what I hear, you got something a little different than you expected when you were married as well.”

The woman glared. “What is that supposed to mean?” she spat out.

Mary shrugged. “Women often marry men that they can believe in. I believed John had a good heart. I thought we could work past his troubles together, but I was wrong. Perhaps you married a man you thought had a good heart, too. A pure soul. A man of God, maybe?”

The woman eyed her skeptically. “Maybe…” she relented slowly.

“But it’s so easy to pretend sometimes,” Mary told her, shaking her head. “John pretended he had it under control. Your husband, he pretended he was something other than what he was. A tyrant, I’m told. Spare the rod and spoil the child?”

“There’s nothing wrong with discipline,” the woman protested softly, shaking her head. “The Bible tells us…”

“The Bible tells us to love one another,” Mary replied. “That’s the most important part. I tried to love John for who he was but in the end, I had to let him go. For me, and for my children. You tried to love your husband for who he was but when he changed, you changed to, didn’t you?”

The woman closed her eyes; it seemed almost as though she couldn’t even look at Mary as she spoke.

“Castiel remembers, you know. Talks about days when a simply being a rambunctious child didn’t earn a switch across the back. When he had an aunt that he loved and could go to for help, and not a woman he feared crossing, who shamed him for who he was,” Mary went on.

The woman shook her head. “I never -- I didn’t want…”

“There are two things a woman can do when she’s married a man who isn’t what she expected,” Mary told her. “She can put him out of the house, or she can jump on board with whatever it is he turned out to be. From what I hear, I did one, and you did the other. We all make bad choices. In the end, it’s up to us to learn how to live with them.”

“And you can do that? Live with your choice?” the woman asked her. “You put the father of your children out of your home, and you were able to live with that?”

“It wasn’t easy,” Mary said with a shrug. “In fact, it got even more difficult after that, but we found our way. John doesn’t drink anymore. He _is_ the man I thought I was marrying. But the consequences of the choices we made are still there. You see that boy up there, standing at the altar?”

The woman nodded, gaze following Mary’s to where a lanky young man stood. He looked like the older one, Dean, just a bit, same hair and stance, but was reedier, his features just a little different. This one, she realized, was not Mary’s son.

“I hated him once,” Mary admitted with a sigh. “I hated who he was, what he represented. You see, when I put my husband out, it took him some time to give up the drinking for good. He made a mess of himself, found another woman for a time… neither of us knew about the boy, Adam is his name, until his mother died. Then he turned up on my doorstep with a birth certificate and a sad story and oh, I hated him.”

She dropped her head, still ashamed at what she had once felt. “Here was this young man, who had nothing and no one left in the world but a father he hadn’t met, and I could stand there hating him because he wasn’t _mine_ , because he was a part of my husband’s life that could never belong to me.”

“But if he had no one…” the woman started, and Mary nodded.

“Exactly,” she agreed. “We took him in, and there I was, hating him all the time. I didn’t let him see it, of course. Tried to keep face, if only for John’s sake. And then one day, Adam looks at me and he says ‘I’ll never be able to repay you for everything you’re doing for me’. Can you believe that? Me, spending my days hating him, wishing he was gone from my home, wishing him gone from all of our lives, and he’s _grateful_ for it. Never felt so ashamed in all my life.”

“And you don’t… hate him anymore?” the woman asked.

Mary smiled, even as a tear slipped free and slid down her cheek. “I love him. He’s one of my boys. He’s my husband’s son, the brother of my children. He’s a part of our family. I was jealous once, feeling like he had taken something from my boys that didn’t belong to him, but it wasn’t his fault at all, was it? Adam is who he is. None of us get to choose where we’re born, or why, or how. We are who we are. It’s the choices we do make that make a difference.”

“Like choosing who to marry,” the woman filled in, fiddling with her wedding band once again.

“Like choosing who to marry,” Mary agreed. “Like choosing what we do when our lives, when our _children_ don’t live up to our expectations.”

The woman sniffled. “You must think I’m a horrible mother,” she said quietly.

“I think you made mistakes,” Mary replied, shaking her head. “But it’s not on me to forgive you. It’s on your nephew… and it’s on your daughter.”

The woman winced even at mention of them, and shook her head. “How could I ever ask them to… I hurt them both, all of them, I hurt them so badly, how can I…?”

Mary reached and put her hand over the woman’s, giving a gentle squeeze. “Hael wants to forgive you, Naomi,” she said, letting the other woman know that she had known who she was all along. “If she hadn’t, she wouldn’t have sent you a wedding notice, would she? Tomorrow, Castiel is going to walk her down the aisle and she is going to marry my stepson, with her little boy -- your grandson -- right there at her side. She wouldn’t have told you if she didn’t want you to come.”

“I can’t ask her to do that,” Naomi all but whispered.

Mary stood and stretched, her back beginning to ache. Maybe the cold was beginning to get to her after all.

“It’s your decision,” she said. “I won’t tell her you came. But there’s always hope. All we have to do is learn to let go of things we thought we knew, so we can understand the truth.”

“Thank you,” Naomi told her, standing quickly and scooping her coat into her arms. “I should… I should go. You have… if… please. Please, just make sure she’s happy.”

Mary nodded and watched her rush out, sighing to herself. She had a feeling it wouldn’t be the last time she met Hael’s mother, but if she wasn’t ready to speak to her daughter, Mary couldn’t force it. 

Besides, there was still so much to do.

“Okay boys, settle down,” she called, heading up the aisle even as the doors to the church swung open and closed, letting in a cool blast of air. “We have to get through this rehearsal before the lasagnas I have waiting in the oven dry out! Should we take it from the top?”

**Author's Note:**

> Beginning work on a final entry for this series, tentatively titled: The End in the Beginning


End file.
